Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Lynch Drops the Bomb (and the Hammer)

I’ll admit it: I’m one of those who winced upon learning, a
couple years ago, that David Lynch would be returning to Twin Peaks.Catch lightning
in a bottle once, you don’t do anything as silly as it attempt it again, right?

Especially when again is fully twenty-six years later.

I also figured Lynch had to be smart enough to know betterthantry.

So now, then, this corollary admission:

The new Twin Peaks, eight of eighteen episodes in, is pretty
dang good.

True, the Dougie Jones stuff is thin gruel. (Kyle MacLachlan’s often
touching portrayal of a fugue-state Agent Cooper isn’t the problem; Lynch and Frost’s meandering, uninspired vision of suburban and corporate Las Vegas is—a problem only exacerbated by the fact
they seem, sometimes, to be using this stuff to spoof Mad Men and Breaking Bad.)

Beyond that, though, the show does indeed
recapture a fair amount of the surreal, wondrous-strange magic of the ’90 and ’91
seasons.

And at least some of
the new season finds Lynch dropping the hammer, leaving behind the delightful, "is this for real?" hokeyness thatisthe show's calling card to do what he did in 1986’s Blue
Velvet and 2001’s Mulholland Drive:
demonstrate he can hang just fine, thanks very much, with the Scorseses,
Spielbergs, and Kubricks of this world.

Episode 8, which Showtime calls “Gotta Light?,” is pretty much
one big drop-the-hammer moment—a not-uncommon assessment, I know, having taken in a fair bit of the best-hour-of-TV-ever! yowling
(this,
for instance—or this)
that started about two minutes after the episode finished airing.

So what is Episode
8?

For its first twenty minutes, it’s just a particularly tense,
taut, strong third-season episode—one
featuring the most unnerving (as of that moment,
at least) incursion yet of surreal/supernatural forces into the show’s universe.

And a Nine Inch Nails musical interlude, too.Because why not?

After that, though, the remaining forty minutes—and they
work well as a standalone short, in case anyone’s intrigued but notfamiliar with the larger, admittedly
complex Twin Peaks cosmos—are
Lynch’s meditation on…

The bomb.

The nuclear bomb.

Now, part of what makes these final forty minutes so
remarkable is that there’s precious little in Lynch’s forty year-old oeuvre to suggest
a meditation on thisparticular
subject was coming—though the instant thisviewer saw the 1945 Trinity test erupt on his own Twin Peaks monitor, he felt in his bones it was right, on some level,that Lynch should finally arrive here.

The other thing that makes these forty minutes remarkable is
their pulverizing beauty.I mean, they’re
very possibly the forty most gorgeous minutes Lynch has ever put on
screen—stuff to rival the Scorsese of Raging
Bull, the Spielberg of Schindler’s
List, and (this one’s especially apt) the Kubrick of 2001: A Space Odyssey (wait till you see what’s inthat mushroom cloud).

Add to all this the fact that the final twenty of those
forty breathtaking minutes (it’s a two-act short, really, twenty minutes per
act) are doing great Amurican monster-movie
horror….

And…wow.Right?

This, quick, though, before we turn the corner and
acknowledge that Episode 8 may not be flawless,
exactly:

True, a whole lot of that fantastic forty minutes is
thickly, aggressively surreal.But you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to sort out the nightmare we’re watching here.(It sorts way
more neatly than, say, Laura Palmer’s frequently mind-bending Black Lodge
appearances.)

Everything at first blush bonkers in this forty-minute, two-act short—the creepy white motherhomunculus vomiting up eggs and evil
spirits; the shimmering gold mist emitting from our beloved old friend the
Giant’s skull; the crackling, flickering “woodsmen” scurrying about that 1940s
gas station; the Abraham Lincoln-gone-satanic figure staggering around the
nighttime desert, croaking “Gotta light?” at terrified New Mexicans, crushing their
skulls in his hands, uttering into a commandeered radio-station mike the terrifying
gobbledygook ("This is the water, and this is the well...") that makes everyone in listening range collapse into slumber; the
good-luck penny discovered “heads up” (our 16th POTUS again); the half-frog, half-cicada, all-horrible thing that hatches
in the desert, then disappears, God help us, into that beautiful sleeping
child’s mouth: it’s all clearly
harnessed toward illustrating one pretty coherent notion:

That the U.S. surebetrayed
itself—sure delivered evil unto
itself—when it concocted the bomb.

(If anyone doubts Lynch is taking us to a moralplace here, consider what’s
playing as his camera goes 2001 star-gating
through that mushroom cloud: Krysztof Penderecki’s jarring
contemporary-classical piece, “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.”)

So whydoes it
make perfect sense that Lynch should finally, after forty years, arrive here, at the bomb?

Because his whole body of work is about the seething, wormy
underside of post-World War II American life.

It’s an oft-noted feature of works like Blue Velvet and both the old and new Twin Peaks series that it’s tough to tell when, exactly, they’re set: the 1950s?The ’80s?The twenty-first century?Whatever
the exact—or maybe shifting—time frame, we’re
always in post-war America, land of
white-picket-fenced houses, blue-jeaned and motorcycle-jacketed bad boys, Main
Street hardware stores, land-line phones with spiral cords, lead-sled muscle
cars, linoleum-countered roadside diners, etc.

And post-war America begins,
of course, with the bomb.

If there’s a seething, creeping, mostly-concealed evillurking in
post-war America—an evil forever threatening to let the content of our nightmares
rupture forth into our friendly bobby-socks-and-apple-pie waking lives—it’s gotto
have something to do with the bomb.

It’s got to somehow originate
with the bomb.

And when the aforementioned beautiful sleeping child, fresh
from the most adorably chaste first kiss you’ve ever seen, opens her mouth to
let that nightmare bug fresh from the nuclear-bomb-blasted sands up the road
from her family’s Craftsman house crawl down her throat, the message couldn’t
be clearer:

The bomb is the truly hellish evil all Cold War-American children swallowed.

A coincidence,
maybe, the beautiful sleeping child swallows the nuclear-mutant bug right afterher first date with her counterpart,
upright and handsome post-war American boy?

Sorry. No.

Soon enough, no doubt, these two will start a family—maybe-possibly
Laura Palmer’sown.

And we know, we Twin
Peaks watchers, what trouble family
is in Lynch’s universe.Right?

It’s a good place to get serial-raped and murdered, your
middle-class American post-war nuclear family. It's the cultural institution, in Lynch's imagination, bearing the brunt of the terrible karmic toll for the great American sin of the bomb.

So there’s what Twin Peaks has to do with Hiroshima.

Anyway…I’m not here,
again, to accuse “Gotta Light?” of being a perfectwork of art. Here’s the problem:

For instance: that scary face peering out at us from within
the creepy white mother homunculus’s vomit stream isn’t just some anonymous evil spirit.

No.That’s Bob.

And it would appear we’ve just witnessed the birth ofBob. (Funny: "Bob" is an acronym of "birth of bob." And it's one wee letter off from "bomb," too. Hmm.)

Bob comes from the creepy white mother homunculus’s vomit.

And the creepy white mother homunculus ("the Experiment," she's called in the closing credits) comes from the bomb.

I wasn’t sure what sobothered me about this until I saw Margaret Lyons’ question to herself in
her own post-Episode-8 New York Times article: “does
Bob, a supernatural manifestation of evil, really need an origin story?”

Exactly.

Who knows where Bob
comes from?

He’s an owl.He’s the
wind in the Douglas Firs.He’s your own
father.

There had been, up to now, no explaining his insane malice.It just appeared, implacable and
irrational. And if Bob just appeared in the Palmer household, he could just as easily show up behind your couch, be at the foot of your bed.

And if I don’t need to know how Bobcame to be, I sure don’t need to know how Laura Palmer came to be. Yet "Gotta Light?" seems to want to reveal this to us, too: her soul springs straight from the skull of our
beloved old friend the Giant—a guy we’re having to start to suspect might be, like, God
or something.

Laura is created as a direct counterbalance, apparently, to
the evil of Bob, newly born in the flames
of the Trinity test.

Meh, I say.

I don’t particularly want
to understand how the Giant, Mike, the Man from Another Place, the
Evolution of the Arm, Bob, and the version of Laura Palmer haunting the Black Lodge operate.These supernatural figures' logic—their “rationality”—has always been delightfully opaque and alien;
I’d hate to think we’re entering a phase of Twin
Peaks in which Lynch starts over-explaining his universe’s otherworldly
metaphysics to us, starts revealing too much
of what goes on behind the red curtain.

I don’t ever want
to know why garmonbozia (human pain and suffering) must take the form, in the Black Lodge, of creamed corn.

About Me

Stephen N. doCarmo is professor of literature and composition at Bucks County Community College in suburban Philadelphia. He's the author of History and Refusal: Consumer Culture and Postmodern Theory in the Contemporary American Novel, published by Lehigh University Press.